Welcome to Wake Mountain. Here you’ll receive articles, news, and conversations from myself as well as other guests as we draw upon what it means to lean into the unstable pulse of these unraveling days and report back on what might be asked of us by these troubled and troubling times.

You’re likely well familiar with mainstream contemporary ‘woke culture’ by now — the global movement that aims to see us all awaken into higher realms of consciousness and bring about a more just and equitable world.

Well, this isn’t that.

But it is also perhaps not *not* that either…It is perhaps a compliment, or a sisterhood to woke culture — perchance another register of motion which could be recognised by its decidedly downward, chthonic trajectory, as opposed to one of awakened transcendence and upwardly-reaching liberation. If woke culture is the earnest tree-branch stretching up and out to meet the sun’s rays, then wake culture is this same tree’s roots burrowing deeper into the earth and weaving themselves among the mycelial fabrics. And if woke culture understands such a descent into the underworld to be simply a symbolic stage on the journey of re-birth that culminates in an ascendent reunification with the Light, then wake culture understands that this allegorical resurrection could only find fertile ground within a field that has previously been sewn with the beguiling seeds of Being and Non Being.

Rather than absorbing itself with tearing down the old or overturning the Ancien Régime, the emergent movement of wake culture and its scattered heralds instead opt to

slow

down

and allow themselves to be fully overtaken by the consequences of the engulfing waves of history and ancestry that wash over and inundate our ragged cultural levies.

And from the belly of those inundated depths of consequence and cataclysmic compact, might it be that a hoard of stories and exchanges be collected like memorial-stones and laboriously brought ashore. And once ashore, perhaps those who carry them might array them among the gathered-in, and together they might resolve to patiently place each of these memorial-stones one on top of the other, in the manner of building a cairn. And perhaps slowly, slowly, the mass of stones would be witnessed from below in their rising-up aloft and spreading at their base; a kind of collective industry of invoking a living and wakeful mountain of memorial and prophecy. Perhaps through this labour of binding ourselves into a redeemed covenant with our culture’s immense wake, we might then better fathom the weight and burden of our collective cultural and ancestral pasts and collectively bear witness to the manner in which they conjure the meanings of our now through the foretelling of our endings yet to come.

The itinerant denizens drawn to Wake Mountain could be considered those for whom revolution and a New World has lost its siren-song allure; those who have subsequently called off their probing search for the pure and noble Other whom they mistakenly believed needed saving, and who instead now steer their culturally-marooned ships back towards a homeland they never knew, nor will ever arrive at. Wake Mountain welcomes those who might muse upon how it came to be that I should write this very dispatch here from a town named “New” Hartford, in a state named “New” York, and thus recognise that modern culture’s signature is it’s imperious insistence on inhabiting anywhere - and anywhen - other than the wheres and the whens from which it derives it’s sustenance from. Wake Mountain affords solace for the sometimes introverted and introspective who seek some respite from the spectacle and outrage of the snarled and tangled camps of polarised partisan opposition and their utopic dreams-come-nightmares.

For you who feel called to deliberate and grieve over all that has been laid out before us, and in turn to rouse an eloquent wake for how it all came to be thus, it is my hope that Wake Mountain may provide a worthy ground by which to take your bearings. Blessings on you and yours, and those weary of heart yet generous still with their grace.

Sincerely,

Christos Galanis

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